This invention relates generally to water purification and more particularly to a new and improved regeneration treatment for activated carbon.
The use of activated carbon for the purification of drinking water or the tertiary treatment of waste waters is well known. Water purification processes using activated carbon have proven effective for industrial wastes, particularly those containing organic matter that is not easily biodegraded, and for household waste water.
Water purification processes using activated carbon have several characteristics that make them attractive including the ability to handle sudden surges of load or concentration of organic materials in the waste waters being treated, applicability to a large range of industrial effluxes, and low capital investment. However, for processes using activated carbon to be economically feasible, after the carbon has been saturated, some means of regenerating it must be employed to render it suitable for reuse.
Various methods of regenerating activated carbon have been proposed and implemented. These generally employ thermal, chemical, or biological processes for effecting regeneration of the carbon. All of these treatments are expensive and set a limit on how economically adsorption purification processes can be run. For instance, thermal treatments, which are presently the most commonly used methods for regenerating activated carbon, are characterized by large losses of activated carbon.
For this reason the use of activated carbon has generally been limited up to now to purifying drinking water or to the purification of household waste water.